Windows Search Guide in IE7

Hi, my name is Jane Maliouta and I am a Program Manager on the IE Team working on the Windows Search Guide.

Throughout the development cycle, we’ve blogged about Search in IE7. The Windows Search Guide is part of Instant Search, a new feature in IE7. The search guide page displays search providers that users can select to customize the list in the Instant Search drop down. The providers displayed in the Windows Search Guide are the most popular for each region based on 3rd party website traffic data. Over time these providers will be updated to reflect the most up-to-date popularity.

Accessing the Windows Search Guide is easy. Simply go to the drop down menu of the IE7 Instant Search and select Find More Providers:

In the latest version of the Search Guide, we’ve added a really cool feature called Create Your Own. You can use this feature to add custom search providers to Instant Search. Just follow 5 easy steps to install your favourite search provider, if it’s not already listed on the Search Guide. Any search providers that display the search terms in the URL are supported by the feature. There is also a way for you to tweak the character encoding if you find that some of the characters do not appear correctly after the search provider has been installed. (By default, the feature uses UTF-8, so unless you know the exact character encoding of the provider, I recommend you stick with the default as its most common)

Create Your Own is present in all English guides and will be soon available in the localized versions of the Windows Search Guide as they are released.

The English guides have the new look and feel along with the new Create Your Own feature, as displayed above. As we continue to release localized versions of IE7, look for the new updates to the Localized Search guides to match the English ones.

If you have not yet tried Windows Search Guide, go check it out and let me know what you think.

why didn’t u implement self-blankness of the search bar after the quiry was executed? it’s annoying having strings like "hot-lolitos" hanging at my eyes level when i found what i’d been looking for. and yet why there is no option like "open query results in a new tab" or something? hope u listen to community, men

Jane, you seem like a nice person and I don’t know where else to go, so here’s my question. When I try to access Google through IE7 I am unable and the curser reads ‘Internet Explorer cannot display the webpage.’ The same happens with ESPN although all other sites (20-30) no problem. Am I doomed?

By the way, for a future release/update, I’d like to see the ‘open in new tab’ arrow that you get when hovering over a favorites item implemented in more places, like in RSS feeds, History, and in the search dropdown menu.

I can’t seem to find a way now to open your search results in a new tab if you want to use a different search provider than the currently selected one. ALT+ENTER opens it in a new tab but uses the currently selected search provider, but when selecting a different search provider from the dropdown it automatically starts the search, in the current tab.

When you run I.E.7 for the first time it asks you whether you want to keep your existing search provider. If you say yes, you’re given the MS offering, regardless of which search engine was being used previously. Someone who, for example, uses the Google toolbar is going to expect that this means Google will be the search provider.

How on earth did this get past basic testing? The wording needs changing.

ie7 won’t start at my home page – it always starts with the ie7 welcome page. i only installed ie7 tonight & i am already just about ready to uninstall it. i want it to start on the page i choose, not some piece of crap you guys might want to force me to see

For many many years I’ve been one to first edit the registry to get my "prefix" search working in IE. For example, "g Xbox 360" would immediately redirect to google and search for Xbox 360.

Then TweakUI for Xp came out, and made it even easier (a nice GUI to do it).

The cool thing about IE7 is that it will search without having the prefix. You don’t have to enter anything in the SearchBox. Instead, enter at least two words in the URL area and hit Enter. IE7 will use your default provider and search for those terms.

I have the same problem with always starting at IE7 start page. I have been through all the steps you told Katrina, over and over again. I selected my search engine,etc. but still get the same start page. I do not want to go through this every time I use ie7. How can I stop it?